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Artist's Notebook Gallery shows

Rodin and food

Contributed by Peter Dudek / I was on my way to ISAW – NYU’s Institute of Studies in the Ancient World – when an email from The New Yorker appeared on my iPhone. They had just published a story entitled “Love is a Mental Hospital.” A terribly precise and painful title for structurally confining relationships; often by one’s own choosing. Have we not all been there? And what about life as an artist? Is that not also an entanglement of rapture, love, hate, and malaise? Believing I understood the situation deeply, I wondered if reading the story was necessary. But could there not be a different take, a new perspective? Why not? I returned to the email and, of course, the title was not “Love is a Mental Hospital” but rather “Love in a Mental Hospital.” A story about…

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Solo Shows

Opal Mae Ong: Worlds weighing in

Contributed by Lucas Moran / “Always Were” is the title of Opal Mae Ong’s solo show at Plato Gallery. It’s a compact declaration – two words that look both forward and back. The work does the same. Old ways, rituals, medicines, and inherited knowledge blur into future or parallel worlds: gradient skies without brushstrokes, glowing plants, and figures who bathe, offer, watch, and mourn. Grief is a constant presence here – not as melodrama but as a condition with the same dignity and value as joy or love. Ong treats all of it as coexistent. Nothing replaces anything.

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Gallery Guides NYC Gallery Guide

NYC Selected Gallery Guide, April 2026

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In “New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art,” an article that recently appeared in the winter issue of October, artist Josh Kline points out that art has long been curated, funded, and institutionalized by the very galleries and collectors who profit from it and the schools that train its participants, without necessarily serving the majority of artists. Most NYC artists are familiar with the story Josh is telling, as many have weathered previous market downturns. Some can remember the 1989 stock market crash, the devastation of 9/11, and the 2008 recession. Now, after what has become a years-long rout, even A-listers like Josh feel compelled to rethink the cost of maintaining a NYC studio as the market for their work has changed.

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Gallery Guides Hudson Valley & Vicinity Gallery Guide

Hudson Valley (+ Vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide, April 2026

Contributed by Karlyn Benson / Every month, it seems there is one day when there are so many openings and events in the Hudson Valley that it is physically impossible to attend them all. For upstate art lovers, this challenging experience is happening twice, on both Saturday, April 4 and Saturday, April 11. The first Saturday in April brings new exhibitions at SEPTEMBER, Philip Douglas Fine Art, Front Room Gallery, Jane Street Art Center, Headstone…

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Solo Shows

Barbara Takenaga’s pinballing fantasia

Contributed by Peter Schroth / Barbara Takenaga’s current exhibition at DC Moore, “Parallax,” picks up from her 2024 exhibit “Whatsis” and continues an arc roughly twenty years in the making. The works are acrylic on canvas and panel and range from diminutive rectangles to monumental multi-paneled pieces.Takenaga iterates her signature techniques of pouring and handwork seamlessly, in a lead-and-follow approach that balances randomness, intuition, and calculation.

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Group Shows

Turn Gallery: The 1990s in collective memory

Contributed by Zach Seeger / Figuration, transformation, and materiality are on display at Turn Gallery in the group show “We Are Parts.” The work of Lily Rose Fine, Olivia Springberg, C Lucy Whitehead, and Caroline Zurmely nods gracefully to fragmentary bodies and mementos of the deceptively carefree 1990s aesthetic, vaulting dated, picayune fashion into collective memory and saving it from dissolution into the vast sea of pedestrian art. 

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Resident Artist

Two Coats Resident Artist Dale Emmart, April 12–17, 2026

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In April, Two Coats of Paint welcomes resident artist Dale Emmart. Her work reflects a sustained and expansive meditation on rope — in oil, ink on washi, woodcut, and artist books. For her, it is a widely evocative pictorial object owing to its sheer versatility. Essentially unchanged since the Egyptians first documented ropemaking in 4000 BCE, it admits of a remarkable range of associations: industriousness and energy, lethargy and repose, entanglement and freedom.

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Group Shows

Springs Projects: Concerted vibes

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Personal Space,” the group show now up at Springs Projects, is especially impressive for the steady, uninflected confidence it reflects in art as a part of life, devoid of commercial pandering or sheepish self-doubt. Considerable credit for this virtue goes to Tommy White, co-founder of the gallery. As he hung the work, all made by his adult students from the Art Students’ League, and forged the show’s overall coherence, White consulted the artists to ensure that each individual voice was preserved. His curatorial hand is masterful, harmonizing seeming divergence and distinguishing apparent similarity. For a group show to sing, of course, the artists themselves need to possess a sufficiency of talent and heart. This gang does.

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Solo Shows

Lois Dodd: A balm against cynicism

Contributed by David Whelan / I first saw a Lois Dodd painting in 2004. View through Elliot’s Shack Looking South was part of a group show at our college gallery when I was a freshman. The painting absolutely stunned me and served as a touchstone throughout my education and early adulthood. Dodd’s solo show “A Radiant Simplicity” at The Art Gallery at Brooklyn College might have done the same for others.

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Solo Shows

Amelie Mancini: Longing and wonder

Contributed by Caroline Otis Heffron / Amelie Mancini’s debut solo exhibition at Massey Klein Gallery, offers poignant reflections on women, enticing viewers with harmonious colors and intricate patterns that initially convey a sense of contentment and balance. But her layering techniques, involving translucent paint, and repeating motifs – reminiscent of  Vuillard, Matisse, and Modersohn-Becker – encourage closer study of gesture and expression. As the viewer moves in, archetypal faces emerge with expressions of longing and wonder, leaving ambivalence. 

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Ideas about Painting Museum Exhibitions

St. Francis at the Frick

Contributed by Ken Buhler / There is an unsubstantiated claim in Catholic lore that the number of books written about St. Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226) is second only to the number written about Jesus. But keen interest in the life of St. Francis has been continuous. During his lifetime, his many followers had already established a religious order in his name. My particular interest began towards the end of the twentieth century, when my job in the Frick Collection afforded me many hours, essentially alone, in the galleries with Giovanni Bellini’s much-beloved St. Francis in the Desert, which depicts an ecstatic St. Francis in an idyllic landscape. 

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